Workers visits Palestinian refugee camps – and finds a people with no intention of abandoning their nation and drifting around Europe seeking charity…
The refugees who don’t abandon nation
WORKERS, JULY 2009 ISSUE
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A Palestine Liberation Official outside the youth centre at the Shatila refugee camp, site of a massacre by Phalange militia in 1982. Photo: Workers |
The increase of migration and asylum seeking has made this a recurring theme in the pages of Workers, where we have argued that workers should fight where they are. Instead of claiming persecution in their own country and finding a way to travel half way around the world to get to Europe, or specifically Britain, they should stay and fight their own class enemy or rebuild their country.
Sometimes, this means basing yourself in a friendly neighbouring country so that you can maintain your fight. For example, those South African ANC activists who could not stay inside the country because they were being hunted down continued to organise against the apartheid regime whilst being hosted in Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Angola.
Many SWAPO fighters were based in Angola until they liberated their native Namibia. With few exceptions, they did not get on the first flight to London and claim political asylum or economic migrant status. They knew where their struggle was.
So it was with interest that our Workers correspondent was invited to visit Palestinian refugees in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and witness first hand if and how they fitted into this concept.
The Middle East has for long been subjected to the control and interference of the imperialist governments of Britain and France. While Egypt and Sudan were effectively British colonies, it was the First World War that brought about the demise of Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire.
Promises, promises
The British, using T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), encouraged the Arab revolt to attack the Ottoman forces, promising the creation of independent Arab states, including Palestine, while simultaneously promising the Hashemite kings’ control of Palestine and Iraq, and the Zionists a home for the Jews in Palestine.
Of course, no such thing happened, and Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq became new British colonies while Syria became a French colony.
For the next 25 years there was resistance to this colonisation resulting in independence following the Second World War. France carved up Syria before independence to plant the seeds of future division, so that it could continue to control part of the region. It separated Lebanon from Syria in an attempt to maintain control through its Maronite Christian stooges. It “gave” Antioch and the surrounding area to Turkey as a gift for its support during the war.
Britain “gave” Transjordan and Iraq to the Hashemites and handed Palestine to the UN in order to legitimise partition into “Jewish” and “Arab” areas at the bidding of the Zionist Organisation and following terrorist campaigns by the Zionist Irgun and the Stern Gang. So just as in Africa, Ireland, and India, the colonial powers used religion and treachery to weaken and divide the post-colonial settlements in order to maintain influence and control.
The first wave of refugees with 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their land took place between 1947 and 1949 – before, during and after the partition in 1948 as Zionists drove Palestinians from their land both in the designated “Jewish” areas and the “Arab” areas. The intervention of Arab armies was unsuccessful in trying to stop this.
Some more refugees became internally displaced in what became Israel. Many more fled to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, (occupied by Egypt), and the West Bank, (subsequently annexed by Jordan). Some even went to Iraq with the retreating Iraqi army. Palestinians in the West Bank were given Jordanian citizenship as Jordan first occupied and then annexed the West Bank.
New wave of refugees
A new wave of 400,000 refugees was created in 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan heights, including Syrian refugees, many fleeing for a second time. Many refugee activists were forced out of Jordan in 1968, and Palestinians living in Kuwait were forced to flee to Iraq following the Gulf war in 1991. Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Iraq had to flee to Syria and Jordan following the Anglo US invasion of that country and the resulting anarchy.
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Children learning English in a youth centre in Sidon. Photo: Workers |
Most Palestinian refugees outside Israel and the Occupied Territories live in Jordan (2,000,000 Palestinian refugees, of whom 20 per cent do not have Jordanian citizenship and live in camps), Syria (250,000 registered without citizenship) and Lebanon (250,000 registered without citizenship). When the internally displaced refugees in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel are taken into account, it is estimated that three-quarters of the Palestinian population have been displaced.
So how are they dealing with the situation they find themselves in as a consequence of Britain’s colonial legacy and as the forgotten people in what is considered one of the world’s most intractable conflicts?
Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, famously said of the refugees “The old will die and the young will forget”, hoping that they would disappear or become transient migrants in somebody else’s country.
But when you speak to the refugees in the camps, it became obvious that this strategy has failed. There are still old Palestinians who can remember being evicted from their land in 1948 and 1967 and who will tell their stories to whoever will listen.
Ask any child in a camp where their home is and they will find a map of Palestine and point to the village from where their family was expelled. Most of their parents still hold the deeds to the land, which has long since been stolen, and the keys to a house, long since bulldozed to make way for a new settlement for Jewish immigrants from Europe and America. In Jordan, Palestinian charities are named after the villages from where the families of supporters of the charity were forced out at gunpoint in 1948.
Organisation and dignity
In the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria, which accommodates 115,000 registered Palestinian refugees, the Coordinator of the Jafra Palestinian Youth Centre told Workers, “Our families have been refugees for sixty years and still there is no solution, just as there is no solution in Iraq. But we have to organise ourselves and maintain our dignity as Palestinians despite this, because Palestine is our home and our struggle. The two state ‘solution’ will not necessarily take account of the right of return of refugees because we can’t all squeeze into Gaza and the West Bank. There has to be recognition of the right of return, even if we don’t choose to exercise it. So we fight on. The main problem for us to deal with in the camps is the youth. There is nothing for them to do in the camps and although they learn to read and write at the UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] schools, there are no books to read. There is nowhere for them to play and no access to the 21st century through new technology. Yet these are the future generation from which the next generation of Palestinian leadership will come. They are our future and the future of our struggle. So we have to work for them and that is our struggle today.”
So the Jafra Palestinian Youth Centre, under the wing of the PLO, has set up a Computer Centre in Yarmouk, organising training in IT skills for children and young people. They also develop media skills, provide English language training, make films, perform plays, music and poetry and have plans to develop a children’s library that will also be accessible to the poor Syrians who live in the camp.
They also organise an annual Summer Camp for children from all the camps in Syria. This is not just about play, but about bringing boys and girls together at an early age, which is breaking a huge taboo, and making them aware of their rights, and in particular, their status as refugees. The kids also learn about respect for one another, the need for organisation throughout the camps and the concept of a secular democratic Palestine, so in the event of their return as part of a one or two state solution, they are prepared to be good citizens.
To enhance the education potential of the children, Jafra is developing a network of kindergartens through the camps to both allow pre-school children to learn through play and to help their parents work. Jafra hopes to spread its centres throughout all refugee camps in Syria. The Coordinator went on to tell Workers “Sometimes we have drug problems with the youth, mainly down to boredom, unemployment and poverty. We intervene to try to help them. Those we help successfully become motivated young people often working to support the Centre. Those we cannot help often turn to religion and cross the border into Iraq to fight the Americans.”
Meanwhile, in refugee camps in Lebanon, the Palestinian Youth Centres have been successfully up and running for some time and provided the model for the first Youth Centre in Yarmouk, Syria. At the Shatila camp in Beirut, which accommodates 10,000 Palestinians, the centre is flourishing.
The PLO Official responsible for all the Youth Centres in camps in Lebanon told Workers “The UNRWA schools have not expanded at the same rate as the population of the camps. Given our situation, education is all that we can offer the next generation. So the Youth Centres provide extra education, training and skills development and provide the kids with useful and recreational things to do. We are not permitted to work in Lebanon and don’t have the money for expensive higher education. We need to make sure they attend school, and we provide extra English language training as well as developing computer and media skills and cultural development.”
Massacre
This camp was the scene of a massacre in 1982 carried out by the Lebanese Phalange Militia. One eyewitness described to Workers what happened: “While Israeli General Ariel Sharon watched through binoculars from a nearby tree-covered hill, the Phalange entered the camp early in the morning and began silently killing mainly women and children with clubs and bayonets. The killing went on for three days and at one stage they buried alive some 400 of our youth in Sport City, a nearby stadium. 4,000 were killed in total, not the 2,000 that the world was told about, including many Lebanese who lived in the camp.”
When asked why he thought the massacre was committed, he replied, “It was to strike fear throughout the Palestinian refugee camps and to make us flee and become transient illegal immigrants in Europe and other Middle East countries. I myself was smuggled through eight countries to Germany but I returned”. When asked why he returned from a job in Germany to poverty in Shatila refugee camp he replied “You can’t change your skin or your nation. Germany was not my country. Palestine is my country and this is my struggle.”
In a refugee camp in Sidon, South Lebanon, an enclosure of poverty surrounded by wealth, the young woman running the Youth Centre told Workers “If the kids drop out of school, they end up on the streets and join either gangs or religious fanatics. We try to keep them in school and help them develop skills, social responsibility and motivation for the future.”
In Jordan, political activity had been restricted in the camps ever since the events that became known as Black September in 1968. However, a Youth Centre is being developed in Baqa’a camp where 80,000 Palestinians live. And in Gaza, a youth centre was operating successfully in difficult conditions, but was a target for Israeli bombs earlier this year.
Palestinians have their own serious political divisions, not a subject for this article. What is obvious to this observer from Workers, however, is that there is a growing movement to take responsibility for the future by nurturing the next generation of Palestinians in the refugee camps, developing their skills as well as developing a secular, respectful outlook. There is a determination not to allow the Islamisation of the Palestinian cause in the camps and to maintain their struggle under very difficult conditions.
They are an honourable people that do not want to desert their land to become itinerant migrants. How different from those so-called “asylum seekers” queuing at Calais to be smuggled into Britain.